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Voynich Sources

A site about the Voynich manuscript

The Voynich manuscript, now MS 408 of the Beinecke library at Yale University, appears to be a late mediaeval scientific compendium written in an unknown cipher script. It has been dated to the fifteenth or sixteenth centuries by experienced palaeographers. Most cipher texts of this period have easily yielded to modern cryptanalysis, but this one has defied experts for nearly 100 years. In these pages I make relevant historical material available in one location, with English translations for those who do not know the original languages but have other contributions to make. I also publish here my own opinions about the origin of the manuscript and speculations about the nature of the original text.

The transcriptions should be treated as revised drafts rather than definitive texts. Thomas Conlon is working on a professional edition of the Kinner-Kircher correspondence, to appear in due course, which will improve on my work.

My thanks are due to Rich SantaColoma who hosted this site for many years.

Twenty first century material

In December 2009 it was announced that the manuscript has been radiocarbon dated to AD 1421 ± 17 years within 95% confidence limits.

Twentieth century material

The manuscript was brought to light by Wilfrid Voynich in 1912 and acquired by the Beinecke Library in 1969. Voynich was something of a mystery man, a political refugee from his native Poland who established himself as a prosperous book dealer in London and later New York. He was coy about the origin of the manuscript when he lectured on it to a conference in 1921, but it came out after his death that he bought it from the Jesuit order in Italy under condition of secrecy. The evidence for this, preserved with the manuscript, is on the website of the Beinecke Library.

There are three descriptions of the manuscript by professional paleographers.

Seymour de Ricci, Census of medieval and Renaissance manuscripts in the United States and Canada, 1935-40.

Barbara A. Shailor, Catalogue of Medieval and Renaissance manuscripts in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, Volume 3
Volume 11 of Arizona studies in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, 1987.

Ricci dates the manuscript to the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries, Shailor to the fifteenth or sixteenth, and Roberts and Watson to the sixteenth: all with due expression of uncertainty.

Seventeenth and eighteenth century material

Also preserved with the manuscript is the Marci letter of 1665, from the Czech scientist Johann Marcus Marci to the Roman Jesuit Athanasius Kircher. It provides a convincing explanation of how the Jesuits acquired the manuscript and was until recently the only piece of evidence about its earlier history. Athanasius Kircher was a polymath with a world-wide network of correspondents and he left a huge archive of letters and documents which they sent to him. When this archive was digitised in the 1990s, Voynich scholar Rene Zandbergen thought to search for other mentions of the manuscript and struck gold.

The two individuals known to have possessed the manuscript before Marci are Georg Baresch or Barschius and Jakobus Horcziczky de Tepenecz (Sinapius), whose signature is found on the first folio. These two books set out what we know of them. Horcziczky is also discussed by Balbin, below.

The archive contains many samples of exotic languages and scripts which were sent to Kircher to be identified and interpreted. Although fascinating, none of them refers to the Voynich manuscript. There is also a story that Kircher was taken in by a supposed old manuscript which proved to be a hoax, but again it seems that the Voynich manuscript is not meant.

One item from the collection of undeciphered writing may interest cryptologically minded readers. It is a cipher message from the Swedish general Baner, sent and intercepted at a crucial moment in the Thirty Years War. Marci sent it to Kircher on 2 March 1641, but it seems that Kircher could not decrypt it.

More than twenty people associated with Prague are known to have written to Kircher, some of whom were friends of Marci and part of his intellectual circle. This is a list with summaries of their letters. Some of them may well have seen the manuscript but only Barschius, Marci and Kinner mention it.

Fifteenth and sixteenth century material

Historical background

On the evidence of the Marci letter, the Voynich manuscript was in Prague during the reign of Rudolph II and remained there until 1665. Since this turbulent period spans the reigns of five emperors and the Thirty Years’ War, some historical background may be useful.

Rudolph II

The earliest possible owner of the manuscript for whom there is documentary evidence is Rudolph II (1552-1612, Holy Roman Emperor from 1576), a notable collector of books, particularly on alchemy. Rudolph maintained two separate libraries, his private library and the library of his museum or Kunstkammer in Prague Castle, and he also appears to have owned books which were housed in neither collection. The catalogue of the Kunstkammer has been preserved and it does not list any book recognisable as the Voynich manuscript. However, many alchemical manuscripts once owned by Rudolph survive and provide evidence about where he acquired his collection. The most striking thing about them is that not a single manuscript was more than 100 years old in Rudolph’s day, and that a great majority of them originated within Germany.

John Dee

Before Rudolph II, all candidates for ownership or authorship of the manuscript are purely speculative. One name frequently mentioned is John Dee, who visited Prague in 1584 and was granted an audience with Rudolph. Dee, a learned courtier of Elizabeth I of England was at this time under the spell of the alchemist and charlatan Edward Kelly, who channelled guidance to Dee from supposed spirits which he claimed to see in a magic stone. Dee was motivated by a thirst for mystical knowledge and kept a detailed record of his actions in a series of manuscripts which were printed after his death as A True and Faithful Relation. We also have his private diary and the catalogue of his library at his house in Mortlake. In fact, an examination of this material reveals no evidence that he owned the Voynich manuscript: it is not in the library catalogue, and esoteric books mentioned in the diary and Relation have been otherwise identified. Dee is known to have met Rudolph on a single occasion, when he did not sell but gave Rudolph a book of his own composition: indeed, there is no record of Dee ever selling a book. The financial transaction involving 630 ducats, which has sometimes been linked to the 600 ducats which Rudolph is said to have paid for the manuscript also proves to be irrelevant. There remains the categorical statement of the distinguished palaeographer Andrew Watson that the Voynich manuscript is foliated in Dee’s handwriting. Assuming this to be true, the most likely explanation is that Dee had access to the manuscript while in Prague but that he did not bring it there.

Johannes Trithemius

The monk Johannes Trithemius, known in his day as a bibliographer, is forever associated with a single sensational episode in a life of service and scholarship. While he was in exile from his monastery of Sponheim in a dispute about his authority, his erstwhile friend Charles de Bovelles accused him of necromancy. In fact Trithemius was a cryptographer, whose privately circulated book Steganographia presented a new kind of cipher with deliberate, occult-looking mystification: he also made bold claims for it to friends such as Arnold Bostius. He explained himself in his next cryptological book, Polygraphia in a dedication to emperor Maximilian I himself, but the controversy he aroused was a live issue for two centuries.

Trithemius defended his reputation by publishing his correspondence for the years 1505-7 as a book. These letters successfully demonstrate that his enemies were politically motivated, that he behaved correctly in exile, and that accusations of black magic were not taken seriously by senior churchmen and statesmen. They are of considerable historical interest and some appear to contain cryptic messages, possibly involving steganography as Gustavus Selenus believed. I here present selected letters of interest and a summary of the rest.

For a scholarly, cloistered man, Trithemius had many enemies. The reason, in part, is that they were opponents of his lord, patron and friend Philip, Elector Palatine (Philipp Kurfürst von der Pfalz) in the recent Landshut War of Succession. I summarise this crucial historical background and its repercussions. These events all took place in the reign of Maximilian I, de facto Holy Roman Emperor since the death of his father in 1493, but still called King of the Romans at this time.

Much that is arcane in the writings of Trithemius seems to have been inspired by his friendship with a man called Libanius Gallus, otherwise unknown to history. The little we know is summarised by Klaus Arnold in his definitive biography Johannes Trithemius (1462-1516) (Würzburg, 1971). My selection of the letters includes all the Libanius references: he is also mentioned in Nepiachus and a passage of the Chronicon Hirsaugiense.

Trithemius was very knowledgeable about early German authors and had read both Hildegard von Bingen (of the lingua ignota) and Otfrid von Weissenburg, a Carolingian poet whose lavish use of acrostics may have been one inspiration for the idea of steganography.

The marginalia

An examination of certain marginalia suggests that the manuscript was in Germany for a period during the fifteenth century.

Three transcriptions

There exist a number of partial or complete transcriptions of the manuscript in a number of transcription schemes. The EVA scheme, used in the comprehensive EVMT project, is the most intuitive, since its aim is to produce a readable version of the text using Roman letters chosen for their similarity to the Voynich script. The most accurate, in the sense of distinugishing the most variants of Voynichese glyphs, is voyn_101 by Glen Claston. The main disadvantage of voyn_101 is that the characters were not chosen for readability. Claston wanted to represent one Voynich glyph by a Latin character which could be stored as one byte. My proposed transcription, NEVA, combines the strengths of EVA and voyn101 by using Unicode to add diacritics to the EVA character set, and is stored as UTF8 instead of individual bytes.

Was the Voynich manuscript enciphered on a grid?

I have speculated that the Voynich manuscript is written in a cipher which used some kind of grid which restricted the occurrence of each character to certain positions within a Voynich ‘word’. The principle illustrated by inserting spaces into the NEVA transcription.

Copyright information

These pages mostly contain second hand material which is either out of copyright or quoted under fair use. My aim is not to make money but I expect an acknowledgement if you quote or reuse any material actually written by me.